14 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN ically, in aristocratic circles that seem too superficial to take love tragically. The perfor- mances by Danielle Darrieux as Madame de, by Vittorio De Sica as her lover the Baron, and by Charles Boyer as her husband, Mon- sieur de, a general, are quite likely the finest each has given. Max Ophuls' lush, decorative style, his re-creation of a vanished elegance, and his darting, swirling camera are used to evoke the protection that style and manners and wealth provide, and to demonstrate that passion destroys it alL Even the fashionable and secure become rash, make fools of them- selves. Madame de places love before honor (what woman does not?), and neither her hus- band nor her lover can forgive her. With Jean Debucourt and Lia de Léa In French. (Theatre 80 St Marks; Jan. 11.) THE EFFECT OF GAMMA RAYS ON MAN-IN-THE-MoON MARIGOLDS (1972)-Beatnce (Joanne Wood- ward), also known as Betty the Loon, is a rampaging jokester-mother who is frustrated and lost; she inflicts her misery on her two daughters (Nell Potts and Roberta Wallach). Although Paul Newman's direction is sensi- tive and well balanced, the Paul Zindel play is essentially a camp version of the mood- memory plays of Tennessee Williams and William lnge. (Thalia SoHo; J an 11.) EMPIRE OF THE SUN-At the outset, this Steven Spielberg epic is so big and majestic you want to laugh in pleasure, and it stays that way for about forty-five minutes-Spielberg takes over Shanghai, and makes it his city. But then, first in bnef patches and then in longer ones, his directing goes terribly wrong. The story, taken from J. G. Ballard's autobio- graphical novel, is set at the outbreak of the Second World War, and it's about Jim (Chris- tian Bale), an eleven-year-old British school- boy, who is separated from his parents when the Japanese Army invades the city, on December 8, 1941, and how he changes in order to survive three years of starving in a prison camp. It isn't told straightforwardly, though. Spielberg throws himself into bravura passages, lingers over them trying to give them a poetic obsessiveness, and loses his grasp of the narrative. For the sake of emo- tion-to have something to say, to give the picture some meaning-he pumps it full of false emotion. (That's what his poetry is ) The picture is a combination of craftsmanship and almost unbelievable tastelessness. Every time Spielberg tries to make a humanitarian statement, he falls flat on his face-not just because his statements are so naïve but because they go against the grain of Ballard's materiaL John Williams' editorializing music swells and swooshes, trying to make you feel that something religious is going on. Chris- tian Bale is a fine performer, directed super- latively; also with John Malkovich, Miranda Richardson, Nigel Havers, and Joe Pan- toliano. The adaptation is credited to Tom Stoppard (it was also worked on by Menno Meyjes); the cinematography is by Allen Daviau. Spielberg haù permission to shoot in Shanghai for only three weeks; the settings were matched up and constructed in Spain and London. 2 hours and 33 minutes (12/28/87) (Movieland 8th Street Triplex, 34th St East. Beekman, Regency, and Na- tional Twin.) FATAL ATTRACTION-A primer on the bad things that can happen if a man cheats on his wife. There's sometimes a fine line between sexi- ness anù craziness, and the hero (Michael Douglas), a Manhattan corporate lawyer-a settled married man-isn't hip enough to catch the danger signals when he lets a woman book editor (Glenn Close) talk him into going with her to her loft Once this woman begin behaving as if she had a righ t to a share in the lawyer's life, she becomes the dreaded lunatic of horror movies. But with a difference; she parrots the aggressively angry, self-righteous statements that have become commonplaces of feminist fiction, and they're so inappropriate to the circumstances that they're the proof she's loco. They're also the director Adrian Lyne's and the screen- writer James Dearden's hostile version of feminism. Basically, this is a gross-out slasher movie in a glossy format, and it enforces con- ventional morality (in the era of AIDS) by piling fear on paranoiac fear With Anne Archer as the beautiful homebody wife, Ellen Hamilton Latzen as the bright little daugh- S-M-T 10 III -w- T II I,: -F-S 8 1 9 15 16 12 ter, and Stuart Pankin as the clowning paL Tip-top editing by Michael Kahn and Peter E. Berger. (10/19/87) (Eastside Cinema, 23rd St. West Triplex. and Embassy.) GOOD MORNING, VIETNAM-With Robin Williams, directed by Barry Levinson. (Reviewed in this issue.) (Cinema II, and Loews 84th Street Sixplex.) HEARTS OF THE WEST (1975)-Jeff Bridges is just the right actor to play Lewis T dter, an Iowa farm boy who writes Western stories and aspires to be like his idol, Zane Grey. Lewis leaves home in 1929, heads toward the land of his purple-prose dreams, and stumbles into a Job as a stuntman in Western pictures di- rected by a penny-pinching hysteric played by Alan Arkin. This nostalgia comedy has an eccentric enchantment to it The troupe of cowboy actors, headed by Andy Griffith, is the most engaging ensemble since the Dead End Kids, and the heroine, a script girl, is played by wide-eyed Blythe Danner, who is reminiscent of both Margaret Sullavan and Jean Arthur. Howard Zieff directed. (Thalia SoHo; Jan 13.) HOPE AND GLORy-A great comedy about the blitz. In this autobiographical film, the wri ter-director John Boorman has had the in- spiration to desentimentalize wartime En- gland and show us the Second World War the way he saw it as an eight-year-old-as a par- ty that kept going day after day, night after night. Boorman lets his characters say the previously unsayable. Bored with crouching indoors during the nightly raids by the Luft- waffe, the dimply blond fifteen-year-old Dawn (Sammi Davis), the eldest of the three Rohan children, runs outside, watches the firefighters at work on a blazing house, and dances in the Rohans' postage-stamp-size front garden. "It's lovely!" she calls out. The large cast includes Sebastian Rice Edwards as the eight-year-old Bill, Geraldine Muir as his little sister, Sarah Miles as his mother, Da vid Hayman as his father, Ian Bannen as his grandfather, and Susan Wooldridge, Der- rick O'Connor, and Jean-Marc Barr as the Canadian jokester (10/5/87) (Quad Cinema.) HOUSEKEEPING-Marilynne Robinson's novel about two orphaned sIsters and the nature- loving, itinerant aunt who arrives to keep house for them has a wonderful representa- tion of a psychological state: Aunt Sylvie seems to spend her life falling into a non-ver- bal world-staring at nothingness. But the novel also has a bag-lady mystique-a poetic view of vagrancy The idea seems to be that if you give up conventional values and ma- terial things you can wander the earth and lead a magical life. Bill Forsyth, who adapted and directed the movie version, doesn't make the material his own; he doesn't find his own rhythms The early scenes are whimsical and promising, but the later ones have a clammy, awkward lyricism. Since Sylvie is always remote and has to wake up out of her basic trance to respond to a situation, Christine f1 v () {) b " " LahtI, who plays the part, can't call on her full resourcefulness (12/14/87) (Quad Cine- ma, and Carnegie Hall Cinema.) THE HUSTLER (1961)-The test of what a man has inside him is set here in the world of pool sharks. Paul Newman is the young contender, Fast Eddie Felson, and Jackie Gleason is the old champ, Minnesota Fats. But the director, Robert Rossen, and his co-writer, Sidney Car- roll, surround the test with an extra forty minutes or so of flabby "poetry" The dia- logue comes out of the thirties and borrows heavily from Clifford Odets. The picture is swollen with windy thoughts and murky no- tions of perversions, and as Eddie's manager the magnetic young George C Scott seems to be a Satan figure, but it has strength and conviction, and Newman gives a fine, emo- tional performance. You can see all the pic- ture's faults and still love it. It's the most vi- tal and likable of Rossen's movies With Piper Laurie, Murray Hamilton, and Myron McCormick. Based on the W al ter Tevis noveL (Thalia SoHo; Jdn. 11.) IRONWEED-With Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, directed by Hector Babenco (Re- viewed in this issue) (Loews Tower East.) JEAN DE FLORETTE- The setting is Provence in the early nineteen-twenties. As the hunchback Jean de Florette, an educated, nature-loving city fellow who has learned about farming from books, Gérard Depardieu wears "GOOD MAN" in capital letters across his wide brow, in smaller letters we can read "He has poetry in his souL" Jean has a devoted wife (Elisa- beth Depardieu), who used to sing in opera, and a delicate little daughter named Manon And for slightly over two hours we watch him trudge across the land he has inherited hauling two barrels of water that are fas- tened across his hump When there's no rain, his plants shrivel and his rabbits die, and it's agonizing for us, because we know that there's a spring of fresh mountain water on the land. His neighbors-the prosperous, greedy old peasant César Soubeyran (Yves Montand) and César's dull-witted nephew, Ugolin (Daniel Auteuil)-have hidden the spring under a load of cement, so that Jean will be forced to sell out to them Adapted from the first volume of Marcel Pagnol's two- part novel "The Water of the Hills," pub- lished in 1963 (it was derived from a picture he made In 1952) The story of Jean de Flor- eUe is completed in the film "Manon of the Spring" (see below) The director, Claude Ber- ri, who did the adaptation with Gérard Brach, aimed for fidelity to the novel; he has said that it was his task to give the material "a cine- matic rhythm," but "there was no need for imagination." That's what he thinks In French. (7/13/87) (Lincoln Plaza.) THE LAST EMPEROR-Bernardo Bertolucci tells the story of Pu Vi, who was not quite three when, in 1908, he was set on the Dragon Throne in Peking's Forbidden City and became the titular ruler of a third of the people on earth. After being deposed and then en throned again in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, he was in Soviet custody for five years, and then spent ten years being "reëducated" in a Chinese war-criminals prison The movie doesn't have the juicy ab- surdity that seems to pour right out of the his- torical story. And it suppresses the drama. But it has pictorial grace and a dull fascina- tion Bertolucci presents Pu Yi (John Lone) as a man without will or backbone who lives his life as spectacle-who watches hi life go by. And so we're given a historical pageant without a protagonist. There's an idea here, but it's a dippy idea-it results in a passive movie. With JOdn Chen and Peter O'Toole Cinematography by Vittorio Sto aro; the film shows the palaces and courtyards of the two- hundred-and-fifty-acre Forbidden City. 2 hours and 46 minutes. (11/30/87) (Movie- land 8th Street Triplex, and 57th St Play- house.) THE LONELY PASSION OF JUDITH HEARNE-A spinster in spite of her sensual nature, Judy Hearne, who lives in Dublin, is all pretension Every- body sees through her, and she knows it, but she can't get rid of her own mealymouthed phoniness: it's ingrained in her. Maggie Smith, who plays the part, lets you read every shade of feeling in Judy's face; she makes you feel the ghastliness of knowing you're a figure of fun Taken from Brian